LITMIR.BIZ

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      It was in the goldmines that Mandela and Justice first looked for work. The mines, which were at the centre of Johannesburg’s economy, were strictly segregated, with enclosed compounds and hostels for the black workers who made up the vast majority of their labour force cut off from the rest of the city. The mining companies maintained close links with chiefs in the rural areas, who helped provide their cheap labour, and reproduced the tribal hierarchies and divisions within the mines in order to bolster discipline and allegiance. The Regent had written some months earlier to arrange a job for Justice as a clerk with Crown Mines, one of the oldest and biggest; and Justice persuaded the headman to give Mandela a humbler job as a mine policeman, with the prospect of a clerical job in three months.³ For a short time Mandela worked as a nightwatchman, with a helmet, whistle and knobkerrie or club – the very picture of the loyal company employee – patrolling the entrance to the compound, which bore notices reading ‘Natives Cross Here’ (one was amended to ‘Natives Very Cross Here’).⁴ At the time the mineworkers were seething with discontent about their conditions and wages – anger which later erupted in the mine strike of 1946.⁵ Mandela kept aloof from the politics, but would always remain proud of having been a mineworker, as he would later tell the union.⁶

      However important Mandela may have felt in Qunu, he was quite insignificant in Johannesburg, and he soon found himself in trouble for boasting that he had run away from home and deceived the Regent. He and Justice were ordered to return home, and fired from the mine. Mandela, who had no wish to return to the country, now had to find a job urgently. A cousin sent him to see a black estate agent, Walter Sisulu, who had an office – before Johannesburg was as strictly segregated as it later became – in the Berkeley Arcade in the city centre.

      Sisulu was a short, energetic man of twenty-eight, with light skin, gap-teeth, spectacles and a habit of chewing his lip. He lacked great presence, but he had extraordinary inner confidence – ‘super-confidence’, he called it – and was to be the most important political influence in Mandela’s life.⁷ He had already shown unusual resilience. Like Mandela he came from a poor region of the Transkei – in his case the Engcobo district – but he lacked Mandela’s status. His father was a white magistrate called Victor Dickinson, who had fallen in love with his mother in Engcobo, but had left her with two children.⁸ Walter’s mother talked respectfully about his father, but Walter realised that he had failed in his duty to his family.⁹ Walter was brought up by his mother and his uncle, a headman, to be God-fearing and respectful towards whites. He enjoyed reading the Bible, and identified with underdogs like David and Moses, but he rebelled against the conservatism of his mission teachers and his family, who once warned him: ‘I doubt if you’ll be allowed to work for the white man.’

      Sisulu left school at sixteen, became a cowherd and then tried his luck in Johannesburg. He worked for four months in a goldmine, hacking rock a mile underground, where he came to be enraged by the brutality of the system. After working in a kitchen in East London he returned to Johannesburg with a new interest in trade unionism. He stayed with his mother, who was now working as a washerwoman for white housewives, and was fired from a succession of factory jobs for insolence and disobedience. He took refuge from his humiliations by learning Xhosa history from a great-grandson of Hintsa, the great chieftain who had also inspired Mandela, but at the same time he broadened his outlook to embrace a wider African unity. After working for two years in a bank he had recently set up his estate agency with five black friends, which he hoped would make him independent of whites (it was to be taken over by a white firm two years later).¹⁰

      Sisulu’s white father, Victor Dickinson, was now a judge at the Supreme Court in Johannesburg; Sisulu would sometimes watch him there, incognito. He was also chairman of a building society, and when Sisulu’s estate agency began experiencing difficulties he went to see him to ask for help. Sisulu did not reveal their relationship: he wanted to give his father a chance ‘to recollect that he had a son like that’, but he gave no sign of recognition. He was, Sisulu remembered, decent and warm, but did not offer him any help with money.¹¹ It was a poignant encounter, about which Sisulu still remains reticent. Did Dickinson ever know that his son was to be one of South Africa’s greatest leaders?

      Mandela was immediately impressed by Sisulu’s mastery of city ways and his fast-talking English, and assumed that he must have had a university education. Sisulu, in turn, was impressed by Mandela’s air of command. ‘When he came into my office,’ he recalled, ‘I marked him at once as a man with great qualities, who was destined to play an important part.’¹² It was the beginning of a partnership which would be crucial to Mandela’s political career. Mandela recognised Sisulu as his intellectual superior, a mentor with an analytical mind. He would never be his rival. He would be the kingmaker, never the king; the trainer, not the boxer. And he provided, by a happy chance, the first crucial rung in Mandela’s city career. ‘It was the most difficult time in my life,’ Mandela wrote later.¹³

      Mandela’s real ambition was to be a lawyer, so Sisulu took him to see Lazar Sidelsky, of the firm of Witkin, Sidelsky & Eidelman, which had black clients as well as white. Sidelsky was a lively, bright-eyed young Jewish attorney who disapproved of politics but believed in treating blacks fairly, and had been shocked to see big law firms ‘suck the blood out of their black clients’. He respected Sisulu, who brought him Africans who needed mortgages, remembering him as ‘a cunning bloke, a bit of a blighter, but astute’. Sidelsky agreed to employ Mandela as an articled clerk, without charging a fee. He soon saw his potential: ‘He was conscientious, never devious, tidy in person and in mind.’ He took an interest in the young man, lent him £50 – a generous sum – and gave him an old suit, which he was to wear for five years. He urged Mandela to keep out of politics: ‘You could serve your people better,’ he told him, ‘if you could prove that there’s one black attorney who’s honest and successful.’

      Mandela never forgot that Sidelsky, as he has written, was ‘the first white man who treated me as a human being’, the man who ‘trained me to serve our country’. A few years later, when Mandela was briefly prosperous and was driving an Oldsmobile, he noticed Sidelsky, who had fallen on hard times, waiting at a bus stop, and gave him a lift home. Sidelsky was puzzled that Mandela would go no further than the kitchen; and the next day Mandela sent him a cheque repaying the £50. Forty years later Sidelsky and his daughter visited Mandela in prison, and joked about his advice to keep out of politics: ‘You didn’t listen, and look where you ended up!’¹⁴

      But politics were all around him. He shared an office with a young white lawyer named Nat Bregman, a cousin of Sidelsky, a ‘light-hearted communist’, as he later called himself. Bregman, a part-time stage comedian, enjoyed Mandela’s company, finding him reserved but with a good sense of humour.¹⁵ He took Mandela to communist lectures and to multi-racial parties where he met friendly white left-wingers, including the young communist writer Michael Harmel. Mandela was amazed by Harmel’s combination of intelligence and simple living – he refused to wear a tie – and later he would become a close friend.

      In the law office Sidelsky warned Mandela against a black communist, Gaur Radebe, who worked in the firm. A flamboyant, strongly-built man ten years older than Mandela, Radebe spoke five languages, and was helping to set up the new African Mineworkers’ Union.¹⁶ He did not conceal his militant views in the office. ‘Keep away from Gaur,’ said one colleague. ‘He will poison your mind. Every day he sits on that desk planning a world revolution.’

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